Digimon Masters Online

Digimon Masters is a point-and-click style MMORPG by Digitalic. Originally released in South Korea in 2009, it finally hits the North American market, bringing along with it a plethora of catchable critters, and the world fans of the show have come to know and love. Save the digi-world using 3 different customizable trainers, and dozens of different digimons of all types and flavors. Though a late arrival compared to its asian release, this is a game Digimon fans will want to try out.

Digimon Masters Online Overview

Digimon Masters is a MMORPG by Digitalic that happens to mostly be known for a previous Digimon game named Digimon Battle Online. It puts players in the role of a variety of trainers boasting different stats, and lets them pick amongst a few starting digimons before sending them out into the world. If you’re a fan of the show who dreams of nothing less than riding your own digimon around then try this game. Otherwise, you might find this a pale contender to the many other free games out there. Alternatively, it boasts an interesting capture mechanic that might catch the interest of some, or prove tedious to others. This is one of those cases where you either love it or hate it.

Digimon Masters Online Screenshots

Digimon Masters Online Featured Video

Full Review

Digimon Masters Online Review

Digimon Masters is a free-to-play MMORPG by Aeria Games and Joymax based on the hit franchise Digimon. Loosely based on the fifth anime’s storyline (Digital Data Squad), this game lets players experience the life of being a Digimon Tamer. With a vast list of Digimons to hatch and evolve as their main selling point, we’ll take a closer look as to whether this game from its long running franchise would still be able to hit both avid fans and newcomers alike.

Gameplay: Game Mechanics and Combat

The game starts off by giving players a choice to pick an avatar based on the four protagonists from the fifth anime, together with one of the four starter Digimons. As an avid fan of the first generation anime, I was initially eyeing on picking the famous spiky haired kid with goggles (Taichi), until I later found out that the first gen tamer avatars were only playable if you purchased them in the cash shop. And Taichi was worth $10! That was a total bummer for my part but at least the all-time favorite Agumon can become one of your first digi-buddies for free!

After the character creation sequence, a set of tutorial quests are setup as soon as the town hall loads up for the first time. Like always, the tutorial quests are there to get players a chance to familiarize the game’s mechanics. The learning process is easy and young gamers wouldn’t have a hard time adapting to its environment. As for the controls, character movements are only maneuverable by mouse and WASD movements are not applicable (commanding your Digimon is just one smooth mouse click or hotkey away). The map and NPC search features are also there just in case you get lost in the Digiworld. Enabling the Search features pops up an arrow that’ll guide you to your destination but unfortunately, the map system doesn’t have an auto-find feature so you’d still have to walk it out manually. So generally speaking, playing Digimon Masters feels very similar to a lot of well-crafted titles around the market in terms of interface.

The combat system in this game is somewhat altered if you’ll compare it to usual MMORPGs. Digimon Masters focuses on your Digimon’s development instead of the tamer so it may also look like the tamer is just a mere pack mule picking up scraps dropped by each defeated wild Digimon. As for leveling up, the only way to progress in this game is through grinding and questing. These quests also let players learn more about the storyline and farming is plain easy for there are LOTS of digital monsters roaming around the world just waiting to spar against your partner.

Digimon Development and Digi-egg Hatching

Getting your Digimons to reach a certain level would also let them learn how to Digi-volve to their next forms. The skillsets change on each evolution and its lethal potency becomes stronger in each evolution stage. The DATS center could help enchant your Digimon with more attributes as long as you have the needed materials for the enchanting procedure and additionally, there exists a Digimental system, which is basically a system to unlock ten elemental crests that will determine your Digimon’s elemental attribute.

There are only two ways to acquire additional Digimon mercenaries in game. The hard way is to tediously farm up monsters until you get a Digi-egg of a certain basic Digimon after which you’d want to say a prayer to the gods that your egg could successfully complete at least three of five DATA injection phases. The other method (and easier one) is to pay up real money and buy a special Digi-egg with a 100% rate of hatching. For gamers aiming to play this game without coughing out a single cent, hatching Digi-eggs is the cruelest part in the game. I guess this is the only portion where spending cash matters and where normal players would really feel a huge gap between them and cash-spending players.

Social Features

Training Digimons with more players is the best way to enjoy the game. If you’re seeking help to achieve your Digimon’s training, there is a party and guild system that’ll add more spice during monster farming and when taking quests. There’s also a PvP arena where players could duke it out and see which one’s got a better partner. Furthermore, fellow players run the game’s economy and everyone can put up a shop that’ll stay up and running even when they’re away from their keyboards. These key social features offer gamers a chance to interact with each other. Unfortunately though, the game seems to focus more heavily on collecting Digimons, and as a result the developers appear to have not given much attention to the game’s competitive aspect.

Graphics

Despite being a game already released for almost half a decade from its original country, the cel-shaded aesthetic presentation of the game never made it look old and out of date. At the same time, if you’ll compare this to its former online game called Digimon Battles Online, the art style used in Digimon Masters sticks to its original presentation, which in my opinion is how a Digimon game should really look like.

And as I’ve said earlier, the game has been around for almost 5 years so if your PC was made in 2010 then you shouldn’t worry about getting a single framerate drop at max settings.

Conlusion: Good

The game isn’t that perfect and the drag of breaking Digi-eggs could be a major turnoff but Digimon Masters is surely able to serve players with a good dose of fun. Just the mere idea of seeing your first Digimon partner evolve to its radical form could excite you enough to keep you at it for countless more hours of training. If you’re looking for competitive or objective-based combat, I guess this game wouldn’t serve as your cup of tea, but if you’re more into collecting and raising your very own little pets then click on this Digi-link to play Digimon Masters today for free!

Previous Review:

If you haven’t dabbled into Digimon before, you’d most likely have heard it being referred to as Pokemon’s little brother. Digimon popularity was at its peak at roughly the same time as Pokemon, the two obviously inspired by one another. The concept behind it is of humans going into this digital world, claiming a digimon (Short for “Digital Monster”), then training and fighting through them to save the digital world. The series was fairly popular for a few years and saw many console iterations, before the craze slowly died down. Digimon Masters is one such iteration, and you could almost call it a spiritual successor to Digitalic’s Digimon Battle Online. Though the craze died down a while ago, there is still enough fans to make a Digimon game. The question is; will Digimon Masters bring justice to a series that marked many gamers’ youth?

Di-Di-Digimon!

When you start up, you’re brought straight to the character creator, unfortunately without having a go through the options first. Once you’ve made your character, you actually can go check the options. This awkward intro was pretty much a preview of the kind of product this would be. The character creation is very, very simple; you choose one of three characters, then one of three digimons, and then proceed directly to the starter area. There’s not much in the way of customizing here folks, and if you were thinking of making your own highly personal trainer, you might have to wait till the next game comes around. Each trainer and digimon has stats, though you are not explained their function at this point(if ever), and even the brief tutorial that follows keeps things awkwardly simple. That said, this isn’t an exceedingly complicated game; it’s a point-and-click, for one, and the principle is very basic; get your quests, beat x number of enemies, then come back. Where Digimon Masters fails to execute this well, is when it comes to moving around. You’ll be sent back and forth between two characters that are about 10 meters away from each other, or in an adjacent area – constantly. There is simply no point to that; why not just reduce it to one talk to each? Considering the frequency with which you’re sent on these errands, this becomes a pretty significant flaw in design that is made even worse by the quality of the areas you’ll visit. Oh yeah, they also do this over long distances, and for trivial side-quests.

Catch Em… All?

Your trainer has his own skill and bar, and so does your digimon. Your digimon has the ability to “digivolve”, an ability fuelled by your trainer’s mana bar that basically gives you an entirely new, more powerful digimon for a few minutes, or as long as you can keep your MP bar up. This means that as long as you keep gulping down mana potions (Or “Vitamin A”), you can keep your super digimon out. Unfortunately, this is one of the only things you’ll use your trainer’s MP bar for. The combat itself isn’t anything special, though some abilities are very flashy, but nothing to call home about. The difficulty is pretty well measured, and you constantly meet new digimons to face, which definitely helps the grind. Your critters are in themselves the core of the game; you’re expected to collect and train them. This is also the most entertaining part of it all and it becomes addictive fairly quickly. You can get Digimons in three manners; by having an egg traded to you, by finding an egg and hatching it, or through a quest reward. Whichever way, you have to hatch it yourself. It’s not any egg that works though; you need a RARE DROP mercenary egg. Then you need a backbreaking amount of semi-rare eggs to extract DNA from so that you can put the entire thing in a hatchery, and get your digimon. Seems easy enough? Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep it so simple. For one, you need a LOT of DNA material. Two, when you try to use it and the egg together, there’s a significant chance that you might lose the material, the egg, or BOTH. And we’re talking about hours of grinding in the same area per egg. If it succeeds, you have a new Digimon. If it fails, it’s hours of your time flushed down the toilet. That is, of course, unless you’ve bought your egg from the money store.

Digital Monstrosity

The graphics and design aren’t that much more impressive. It’s cell-shaded; okay, nothing wrong with that and in essence the graphics aren’t too bad at all, apart from the clumsy interface. Once again, it’s the design where it becomes ugly. The environments are basically all the same, mostly early game. You’re sent into what are basically two identical forest zones existing in parallel, but having nothing to do with each other. They are practically mirrors, except for different digimons, and different area names. Worse, they’re basically corridors linked from town to town that you basically progress through, literally funneled towards the next area as you run back and forth for the multitude of quests, and to fuel your MP potion addiction so you can keep your cool Digimon out. You better learn to love this hole, because it’s where you’ll be grinding your soul away for the next 10 levels, and more if you want a specific digimon. You’ll also be sharing the space with about 20 other players, and since the areas are so small, you better hope you get lucky with your mobs. If you persevere, you might even get a digimon you can ride, which sort of looks like a cross between a narwhal and a purple horse (It’s still pretty cool though). You can also customize your trainer with drops and buys from vendors, with things ranging from T-shirts, to shoes, and so on, which is a nice feature if you plan on sticking around. By this point however, you’ll inevitably have crossed the elder brother of the ugly features – the play time timer. At the time of this review, there is a 3 hours time limit, after which you are knocked out to the logging screen, and must wait for the following day to play. Considering that aside from that the PvP is non-existent, the cash store is very limited and the game is generally just rough around the edges, you might not regret this time limit too much.

Final Verdict: Poor

If you love Digimon to death, go ahead and try it, but don’t expect anything crazy. Could it improve in the future? Not without some severe redesigning, and considering it’s been out for a while in Korea, it’s doubtful that this will ever come to pass. Overall, this game suffers from a plethora of issues, from small things like not letting you reach options, to flagrant design faults like the egg hatching mechanism. The fun of hatching and training digimons is by far outweighed by the flaws, and unless you’ve exhausted everything else Digimon out there and are desperately looking for more, I’d move on.